On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 04:43:09PM -0500, Ross Patterson wrote:
> On Thursday 19 December 2002 01:03 pm, Dan Melomedman wrote:
> > Ross Patterson wrote:
> > > To sum up, has it been definitively established that softdeps are safe? 
> >
> > The way I understand it is they were designed to guarantee metadata
> > integrity, not data integrity. 
> 
> If I read McKusick & Ganger's papers correctly, softdeps were designed to 
> provide the same degree of metadata integrity as synchronous writes with the 
> improved runtime performance of asynchronous writes and the improved 
> dirty-mount performance of journaled filesystems.  The sacrifice was to 
> accept the lower degree of file-data integrity that asynchronous writes 
> provide.
> 
> So if softdeps are working correctly, you gain performance but you lose some 
> file-data integrity on open files that haven't been fsync()'ed.  That's a 

Even with traditional BSD ffs mounted with default options you don't have
guarantees on file-data integrity. Only synchronous mount can give you that.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 23 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--